What ?. A windshield wiper system that significantly improves the safety of most types of motor vehicles.

How ?. The system fully wipes off all precipitation (rain, snow, etc.) from the windshield regardless of intensity yet the wiper’s sweeping motion is not perceived by vehicle occupants. This is achieved by increasing the wiper’s speed sufficiently above the occupant’s awareness. The system exploits the functioning of neurophysiological perception mechanism of vision: the eye cannot register any motion faster than a certain threshold as is the case of TV or PC monitors.

In the traditional systems, the speed at which Conventional Windshield Wipers (CWW) sweep the windshield in semi-circular motion can be adjusted either manually by the driver or automatically with the aid of a rain sensor and a microprocessor.

Regardless of the system, as precipitation increases, the wiper frequency can be increased up to a limit, which may be ~70 rpm (?). If increasing the wipers speed does not help improve significantly the view, the driver then must slow down or even stop the vehicle to increase his/her own safety and that of the other commuters.

Assuming that wiper speeds can be increased above this frequency limit, the windshield will be fully cleaned but the view could be hampered by the wiper motion. Therefore, the efficiency of CWW decreases precisely as it is needed most; or so it would seem.

The wiper sweeping motion of the IOWS can be configured in different ways to make it more efficient mechanically. The configurations can be non-linear and linear. This is depicted schematically in Figs. 1-3. The semi-circular sweeping motion of CWW can still be used although it would have a limitation of the speed at which the blades can accelerate and decelerate at the end of each cycle. Another alternative is to allow the blades to a full 360° rotation. In this case the wiper system can be composed by a single blade or two blades. The axis of rotation can be either at the eye level of the driver and front passenger or it can be placed slightly below the windshield level. This is observed in Fig. 1.

In the second configuration there can be several arrangements. For instance, two vertical blades, whose size is equal to the height of the windshield. They are placed at both sides (lateral ends) of the windshield and run horizontally half-way across the windshield. Or, there can be two horizontal blades whose size is half the length of the windshield. They are placed at the bottom of the windshield and run vertically (Figs. 2-3).